McCain's Señor Moment

After all these months on the campaign trail, it is painfully obvious that John McCain is a spin doctor's worst nightmare. His constant confusions, misstatements and gaffes have dogged him all the way, and while the press has largely given him a pass on it, they're piling up to the point where they can no longer be ignored.

But he really outdid himself this week. Interviewed for the Spanish-language radio network Union Radio, McCain was asked whether he would meet with Spanish president Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero if elected.

"I would be willing to meet with those leaders who are friends and want to work with us in a cooperative fashion," he said. So far so good.

But then he went off the rails.

"And by the way," he continued, "President Calderon of Mexico is fighting a very, very tough fight against the drug cartels. I am glad we are now working in cooperation with the Mexican government on the Merida plan. And I intend to move forward with relations and invite as many of them as I can, of those leaders to the White House."

The question was not about Mexico.

Asked again whether he would invite Zapatero, McCain dug himself in deeper. "All I can tell you is I have a clear record of working with leaders in the hemisphere that are friends with us and standing up to those who are not. And that's judged on the basis of the importance of our relationship with Latin America and the entire region."

Spain is not in Latin America.

At this point, the candidate was so clearly lost that the interviewer took pity on him and tried explicitly to get him back on track. "Okay, what about Europe?" she said. "I'm talking about the President of Spain."

"What about me what?" McCain replied.

Oh, dear God. The man seems to have no idea where he is or what he's talking about. I can excuse his not knowing the name of the Spanish president, but he really should have boned up on it beforehand - after all, he was going on Spanish-language radio.

But does he really not know where Spain is?

The campaign went into full panic mode, rolling out its talking heads to insist that McCain is not suffering from dementia but he actually intended to call Zapatero a dictator. (For the record, Zapatero was democratically elected and is committed to democratic government in Spain.)

Both explanations are dreadful. If you believe the first one, then the GOP nominee is clearly not playing with a full deck and would be a disaster as president. But if you believe the second one, then McCain is dedicated to continuing the Bush policy of ticking off every ally we have in the world, meaning he'd still be a disaster as president.

There is, of course, a third explanation - that McCain simply misheard the question (although the interviewer repeated it more than once) or got confused because previous questions had concerned Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro and other South American leaders who disagree with the United States. But that's not very reassuring either, because one expects the president to know one country's leader from another. Which brings us back to the same question of whether McCain is firing on all cylinders.

In any event, rather than simply admit that McCain got it wrong, his handlers instead created a diplomatic kerfluffle by claiming that he deliberately snubbed the president of Spain. The Spanish embassy released a statement saying, "The only plausible explanation for McCain not wanting to meet with Zapatero, is that, like Bush, he is still angry about Spain pulling its troops out of Iraq in 2004. If McCain carries that much of a grudge then how in the world will he rebuild our relationship with Europe, as he has said he would do."

Great choice, guys.

With six and a half weeks left until the election, only God knows what else he will come up with.

Big Bad Maverick

It appears that the Maverick™ is having a tough time of it lately. Whether it's his claim that only people who make more than $5 million a year can be called "rich" or his insistence that our economic problems are merely "psychological," John McCain seems to be a little, well, out of touch with what's going on in the world.

Over the weekend, the venerable investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed into bankruptcy. Merrill Lynch almost went the same route only to be assimilated by Bank of America. Wall Street responded by sending the Dow down by more than 500 points.

And McCain's reaction to all this was to proclaim that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong."

One might suspect that he hasn't been taking his Geritol.

Barack Obama immediately pointed out that McCain is clearly and "disturbingly out of touch with what's going in the lives of ordinary Americans."

McCain struck back, and he did it mostly by whining.

"This economic crisis is not the fault of the American people," he said. "Our workers are the most innovative, the hardest working, the best skilled, most productive, most competitive in the world. My opponents may disagree, but those fundamentals of America are strong. No one can match an American worker. Our workers sell more goods to more markets than any other on earth. Our workers have always been the strength of our economy, and they remain the strength of our economy today."

Translation: that mean Negro is saying bad things about the people who actually do the work.

Where did the straight-talking McCain go? The John McCain who was always eager to stand up for what's right, even if that meant going against his own party, is dead and gone. In his place is someone who refuses to accept criticism and take his lumps when he deserves it. Instead, this new and definitely not improved McCain always hides behind something or someone.

You can't say anything about him because he was a POW. You can't say anything about Sarah Palin because that's sexist. You can't say anything about the Iraq or Afghanistan wars because you're not supporting the troops. And you can't say anything about the economy because you're attacking the working class.

Meanwhile, his lying has gotten so egregious that Karl Rove - Karl Rove! - called him on it.

It appears that the Straight Talk Express has broken down, and it ain't moving again.

Book-Banning Experience

As the GOP faithful rallied round Sarah Palin this week, accusing the media of sexism for daring to question her qualifications and background, yet another in a very long line of disturbing stories emerged from her tenure as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.

It appears that once she got elected, Palin asked the town librarian if she would purge the library of supposedly inappropriate books. Aghast, Mary Ellen Emmons immediately rejected the demand and Palin responded by firing her. But since Emmons was a popular figure in town, there was a backlash and Palin backed down, reinstating her.

And so the tale of Sarah Palin, caribou hunter and would-be book banner, becomes just a little more sordid. Last month, her church hosted the leader of Jews for Jesus, which would have been blared on Fox News etc. for months on end had it been Barack Obama's church. Add to that the mess over her firing the head of Alaska's state police in retaliation for his refusing to fire her sister's ex-husband, her claim that the Iraq War is a "task that is from God," and more. It just seems to get worse and worse.

(The McCain campaign knows they've got a potential time bomb on their hands in Palin. That's why they have barred the press from asking her any questions in interviews or Q&A sessions. Instead, reporters will be restricted to receiving talking points via the same scripted, choreographed, spoon-fed pabulum that the rest of will receive - i.e., speeches.)

Of course, her nasty and condescending speech Wednesday night only went to show why she was the pick of the Christian Right. Whether it was her sneering references to Barack Obama as a community organizer or her scornful description of the Democratic nominee "turning back the waters and healing the planet," she displayed the mentality that defines the Republican Party. Can't think of a good reason why people should vote for you? No problem! Attack the other guy as an uppity Negro who hates decent white God-fearing Americans.

And considering how the McCain campaign can't seem to get anything right - for example, their confusion of Walter Reed Middle School in California with Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington - it will only get dirtier right up to Election Day.

Better stock up on soap now.

Eagleton Redux?

Back in 1972, George McGovern announced the picking of Thomas Eagleton as his running mate to widespread press coverage. Two weeks later, Eagleton was unceremoniously dumped from the ticket - also to widespread press coverage - once it was revealed that he had undergone electroshock therapy and been hospitalized numerous times for psychiatric problems. McGovern never recovered from the fiasco and went on to get creamed in November.

Are we seeing the same pattern here?

Ever since John McCain announced his VP pick of Sarah Palin on Friday, unpleasant facts have been coming out of the woodwork:

• Palin and her staff pressured public safety commissioner Walt Monegan to fire a state trooper who just happened to be in a bitter divorce and custody fight with Palin's sister. When he refused, Palin fired Monegan and replaced him with a known sexual harasser who lasted only two weeks before being pushed out himself.
  
• Vetting was at best minimal - the McCain campaign knew nothing about the trooper scandal even though it had been big news in Alaska for weeks, and the vetting process seems to have consisted only of a single chat between McCain and Palin.
• She has no foreign-policy experience at all, with Cindy McCain and Fox News being reduced to claiming that she does know about foreign policy because Alaska is right next to Russia.
• As mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, she fired the town police chief for supporting her opponent in the 1996 election, then was almost recalled in the ensuing uproar.
  
• She publicly said she has no idea what the vice president's job is.
• She admitted that her unmarried 17-year-old daughter Bristol is pregnant. (Ironically, Palin opposes actual sex education in schools in favor of "abstinence education," which has repeatedly been shown not to work.)
  

And if all that wasn't enough, there are also widespread rumors that Trig, the family's youngest child, is actually Bristol's, but was passed off as Sarah's.

So with signals of a looming train wreck all around us, just why was Palin selected? Putting aside all the beauty-queen and May-December wisecracks, it appears she was picked for two reasons and two only.

1. She is a woman (or, as Samantha Bee nailed it on The Daily Show, a "vagina-American") whom the GOP hopes can win the support of former Hillary Clinton voters despite having positions completely opposite to Clinton's.
   
2. She is a faithful devotee of the Christian Right, falling into line on everything from banning abortion to opposing gay marriage to teaching creationism as science in public schools.
   

Indeed, there are rampant murmurings that McCain actually wanted Joe Lieberman or Mitt Romney as his running mate, but both of those were nixed by the Christian Right, without whose support he cannot win in November. In other words, she was picked to convince the jihadist wing of the GOP that he will do whatever they want as long as they vote for him.

Not only that, the contempt shown for women embodied in the Palin pick is staggering. The Republicans genuinely believe that women are so dumb that they will automatically support anyone with two X chromosomes, regardless of her actual positions on anything. Poll results show that women realize this, and are not pleased.

So yes, McCain got some momentary good press out of the Palin announcement. But this seems to be turning into a nightmare very very quickly.

VPILF

John McCain has successfully (at least for the moment) stolen Barack Obama's post-convention thunder by naming Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. But seeing as how she's held elective office for less than two years, has zero foreign-policy experience and is even under investigation in her home state for firing the head of the state police when he wouldn't fire her ex-brother-in-law, she may be more trouble to the McCain campaign than she's worth.

But someone didn't wait for the announcement to start sounding off on her. On August 4, someone registered a website domain at http://www.vpilf.com touting Palin for the VP job. Now it just so happens that Palin is a former beauty-pageant contestant, and "VPILF" stands for "Vice President I'd Like to F***."

Really.

Now I started wondering who was behind the website, so I did a little digging. It seems that according to the registration info, it was set up through a masking company in Arizona:

Registrant:
Domains by Proxy, Inc.

DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: VPILF.COM
Created on: 04-Aug-08
Expires on: 04-Aug-09
Last Updated on: 04-Aug-08

Administrative Contact:
Private, Registration VPILF.COM@domainsbyproxy.com
Domains by Proxy, Inc.
DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States
(480) 624-2599 Fax -- (480) 624-2598

Technical Contact:
Private, Registration VPILF.COM@domainsbyproxy.com
Domains by Proxy, Inc.
DomainsByProxy.com
15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
United States
(480) 624-2599 Fax -- (480) 624-2598

Domain servers in listed order:
NS47.DOMAINCONTROL.COM
NS48.DOMAINCONTROL.COM

Domains by Proxy is a company whereupon anyone can register a website and keep their personal details private. So with the domain registered in Arizona, and the GOP nominee being from Arizona, is it too outrageous to wonder whether this is an arms-length ploy by the McCain campaign to "sex up" their VP candidate?

Considering that Karl Rove's winged monkeys are running the McCain campaign, that certainly doesn't seem out of the question. On the other hand, it seems remarkably shabby for even McCain's own handlers to treat Palin as just another pretty face.

On the other other hand, they've pulled stuff like this before. Is there more to this story?

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't

For what it's worth, I never thought Barack Obama would pick Hillary Clinton as his running mate in the fall election, not after all the bad blood during the primary season. But now that Obama has tapped Joe Biden, John McCain has jumped in with both feet. Yes, he quickly unveiled a campaign ad accusing Obama of telling Hillary's supporters to go jump in the lake.

"She won millions of votes but isn't on his ticket," the ad's voiceover says. "Why? For speaking the truth." The way McCain makes it sound, Obama is a thin-skinned elitist who couldn't handle her criticism of him. And he probably hates women to boot.

This is, of course, a crock. If Obama had picked Hillary as his VP, McCain would doubtless have run a different ad reminding voters of all the supposed "Clinton scandals" back in the 1990s, questioning Obama's judgment at selecting such a person to be his running mate.

This is not the first time the McCain campaign has played this game. Back when Obama made his tour of the Middle East and Europe, McCain ran an ad accusing Obama of dissing wounded soldiers in a military hospital in Germany because he didn't meet with them. Only after the ad ran - and it was shown that the Pentagon had advised Obama not to visit the soldiers - was it revealed that the GOP had prepared another ad just in case.

You see, if Obama had visited the troops, McCain would have run an ad accusing Obama of doing so purely for political purposes.

Visit the troops: get accused of using them as props.

Don't visit the troops: get accused of dissing them.

You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

And Everybody Hates the Jews

Rep. Steve Cohen is a Democrat who represents Memphis, Tennessee in Congress, and is doing a pretty good job of it. He is so popular that the GOP isn't bothering to run a candidate this year, not even a sacrificial one. But he does have a primary election today, and one of his opponents has run what just may be the nastiest ad of the year:



"Our churches?" "Our churches?" Nikki Tinker is saying in code what is impolite to say openly: "That Jewish guy doesn't represent us. Vote for an honest Christian instead."

And this is a Democrat speaking. Imagine what a Republican would say.

Take My Wife - Please!

John McCain has a sense of humor which can be charitably called odd. Whether it's singing a let's-bomb-Iran ditty to the tune of the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann," joking about killing Iranians with American cigarette exports, or his jest about a woman being raped by a gorilla, his attempts at humor tend to backfire messily.

And now we have another example.

McCain was in Sturgis, South Dakota yesterday, campaigning at the annual Buffalo Chip biker rally. Now, it is admittedly odd for a 71-year-old man to proclaim kinship with a bunch of big Harley riders, but stranger things have happened. In the midst of the flesh-pressing and speech-making, he made a rather interesting comment about his wife Cindy, who was standing right next to him: "I encouraged Cindy to compete. I told her with a little luck she could be the only woman ever to serve as first lady and Miss Buffalo Chip."

A little explanation is needed here. Every year, one of the high (?) points at the Sturgis rally is an event which ESPN described far better than I can:

Buffalo Chip has a reputation for that sort of thing. It holds a Miss Buffalo Chip contest every night, which is essentially a topless beauty pageant. And occasionally bottomless, too. During a drenching rain Wednesday night, the contest broke up into smaller groups and one woman wound up dancing naked on a bar top. Her boyfriend/husband saw her and angrily dragged her away as she struggled to put her pants back on and muttered something about how, "It's only this one week a year."

So was McCain really volunteering to put his wife on display? I would call it just another of his off-the-cuff attempts at cracking a joke, except the video clearly shows him reading from a prepared text.

If Barack Obama had offered Michelle up like this, the media would roast him for weeks on end - assuming, that is, he survives whatever Michelle would put him through. She's no dummy, and she sure looks tough as nails.

So McCain may have won the biker vote by showing up at Buffalo Chip, but he might have lost the women's vote with his rather crass comment. And there are a lot more women than bikers.

Obama the Anti-Christ?

John McCain - or rather, his handlers - clearly realize that he has nothing going for him. He has no new ideas or new solutions. His entire campaign is based on continuing the very same policies that have dragged the current president down to historically low opinion ratings and the country into an abyss. He has surrounded himself with Karl Rove acolytes who believe that the only way to win an election is to turn your opponent into a baby-eating, grandparent-murdering monster. And if your opponent is intelligent and charismatic with a lot of good ideas, that makes it all the more challenging.

Hence McCain's latest crop of ads and talking points. His surrogates' claims of "presumptuousness" on Barack Obama's part is really just a thinly-veiled way of calling him an uppity Negro who needs to be taught his place in the world. And his TV ad comparing Obama's "celebrity" status with that of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, known nowadays primarily for boozily forgetting to put on underwear, has been widely derided as appealing to racist fears of black men hooking up with white women.

But his latest web ad goes even further.



Now, at first glance, McCain is satirizing Obama's Great White (as it were) Hope image and taking it to absurd extremes. No big deal, and the Ten Commandments clip is pretty funny in this context. But there is something deeper here.

McCain can't hope to win in November without the support of the Christian Right voters who put every one of Tim LaHaye's ultra-violent Left Behind books at the top of the best-seller list. Now it just so happens that the series' principal villain is a man who comes to power by proclaiming peace and international brotherhood but ends up doing the work of Satan.

In other words, the ad is sneakily calling Barack Obama the Anti-Christ.

Classy.

But maybe that's giving McCain's team too much credit. After all, they thought the "McCain Cribs" web video, which patronized and looked down on the young voters whose support they want, was a good idea. So they might not have actually meant to call Obama the epitome of evil.

Nah, who are we kidding? Of course they meant it. They're trying to reach the people who insist that Obama is some sort of black supremacist secret Muslim, hoping to scare them into voting for a nice white Christian man instead of some black guy with the middle name of "Hussein."

But will they get away with it?

Something Greater Than Ourselves

Once in a while, something happens that makes us pause and turn away from such purely Earth-based subjects as politics and elections to make us appreciate the majesty of the Universe.

This morning, my kids and I watched a live feed of a total solar eclipse from halfway around the world. Even on a computer screen, watching the Moon slowly cover the Sun and the solar corona shine out in the darkened sky is an awesome experience.

The astronomy behind an eclipse is easy enough to understand - from Earth, the Sun and the Moon appear to be the same size. Every few years, everything lines up so perfectly that the Moon's shadow falls along a narrow path across Earth's surface. Anyone in that path sees the Moon blot out the Sun for a few glorious minutes.

But knowing the science behind an eclipse and actually seeing one, even remotely, are two very different things. Seeing the effect when the sky darkens and the Sun's coronal halo becomes visible is to know that there are greater things in the Universe than our ephemeral squabbles here on Earth.

The Dark Bush

With Batmania once again sweeping the nation thanks to The Dark Knight, I suppose it was inevitable that the movie's imagery would be used for political purposes. In today's Wall Street Journal, Andrew Klavan makes a rather odd comparison:

There seems to me no question that the Batman film The Dark Knight, currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society - in which people sometimes make the wrong choices - and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

The Dark Knight, then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year's 300, The Dark Knight is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.

The chutzpah is breathtaking. Comparing President Bush to Batman? Let's take a moment to stop our heads from spinning and go down a quick list of reasons as to why this is nuttier than a can of cashews. Batman may be psychologically damaged and a bit weird at times, but he does not:

• Respond to the Joker's crimes by killing the Penguin.
• Kidnap the Riddler, whisk him to the Batcave, and torture him until he confesses to crimes he didn't commit.
• Tell Commissioner Gordon to stuff it while blowing up half of Gotham City and spying on the other half.
• Go on TV and tell the world that anyone who disagrees with him obviously loves the Joker and wants to see a large smoking crater where Gotham City used to be.

You get the idea. You can see political parallels in just about any movie, but this one is really a stretch, to put it mildly.

CBS' McCain Makeover

Many progressive bloggers have seen how the media tends to give John McCain a get-out-of-jail-free card on issues for which they endlessly hammer Barack Obama. For example, Jeremiah Wright's rants were replayed endlessly but John Hagee's rants were greeted with near total silence until they got too numerous to ignore.

But Katie Couric and CBS may just have hit bottom.

On last night's CBS Evening News broadcast, Couric asked McCain about Obama's claim that the so-called "Anbar Awakening" did more to quell Iraqi violence than the Surge™ did. McCain answered that, "Colonel [Sean] McFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that's just a matter of history."

Actually, it isn't. McCain has it exactly backwards. McFarland began talking with the Sunni shieks in September 2006. President Bush announced the Surge™ four months later, in January 2007.

For someone whose entire campaign seems to be based on the supposed success of the Surge™, it's a pretty big mistake and makes one wonder just how up to the job he really is.

This is, of course, not the first time he has gotten something so basic so wrong - witness his repeated confusion of Shia vs. Sunni and his Monday claim that there's a lot more work to do on the "Iraq-Pakistan border."

Iraq and Pakistan do not share a border.

More disturbing than McCain's constant demonstrations of ignorance, however, is how CBS edited their interview last night to protect the candidate. When Couric asked McCain the above question, he responded with a confused ramble which didn't sound good at all. So what did CBS do? They took a different answer and pasted it after Couric's question, thus making it look as if McCain was being far more coherent than he actually was.

This is bad. Editing interviews for time is one thing, but cutting and pasting to make a candidate look better is way out of line.

Shocking

The Iraq War will almost certainly go down in history as America's first privatized war. Jobs once done by the military themselves, from housing and food service to vehicle maintenance and security for ranking officers, were instead contracted out to private corporations. And all too often, we have seen how the Pentagon put even egregious profiteering ahead of the safety of their own troops.

KBR, once a subsidiary of Vice President Cheney's former company Halliburton, was given the job of building and maintaining tens of thousands of structures for American soldiers serving in Iraq. The New York Times is today reporting that the electrical work in KBR-built facilities was so shoddy that during a six-month period from August 2006 through January 2007 almost three hundred electrical fires took place. Even worse, more than a dozen soldiers have been electrocuted and many others have been injured.

It now appears that both KBR and the Pentagon knew more than a year ago that the wiring work - frequently subcontracted to Iraqi companies with reputations for cheap labor and a rather lax attitude towards quality control - was substandard and dangerous. At one building complex in Baghdad, soldiers got electrical shocks on an almost daily basis. KBR electricians say they continually complained to company and Pentagon management that the wiring was a disaster waiting to happen, but their reports were ignored.

And even worse, the Pentagon did nothing even after Staff Sergeant Ryan Maseth was electrocuted in January while taking a shower. They started paying attention only when his family sued KBR to get answers and Congress got involved.

Even today, problems continue - just last month, an electrical fire in Fallujah gutted ten Marine barracks buildings. The displaced soldiers were forced to write home and ask for donations to replace their destroyed personal belongings.

It is a national disgrace that our soldiers, who have already given so much, are forced to fear for their lives - not from a military enemy, but from war profiteers allegedly on their own side. It's even more of a disgrace that Pentagon brass are so wedded to the commercial side of the military-industrial complex that they barely lift a finger to protect their own people.

This cannot be allowed to happen again. The use of private contractors in war-fighting must be reined in.

Comic Relief

Brent Rinehart is a county commissioner running for re-election in Oklahoma City. It appears that his campaign is not the smooth road he evidently thought it would be, for he is mailing out a flyer in the form of a crudely-drawn comic book. And not just any comic book, either.

No, this comic book paints Rinehart as the defender of all things good and depicts him taking on the "liberal good ol' boys" who supposedly run the county government. No big deal there. But then it goes in several very odd directions:

• An angel is seen supporting Rinehart while a devil backs his opponents.
• Rinehart (or his cartoon counterpart) attacks "pedaphiles [sic], polygamists and homosexuals who practice anal sodomy" - which must be the first time such a phrase has appeared in a campaign flyer.
• The flyer blames "the homosexuals [depicted as stereotypical toga-wearing swishy hedonists], the good ol' boy politicians [drawn as shady types in trenchcoats], and liberals to name some" for opposing him.

In a nutshell, it's quite a piece of work which truly must be seen to be believed. One would think a county commissioner would have more important business than bashing gays, but apparently not this guy.

Will he win the election? Or will the forces of evil prevail? Tune in next time!

Know-Nothing Party, 2008 Edition

Back in the 1850s, there was a nativist political movement called the American Party which existed basically to express hostility to immigrants of all types. Party members were reportedly so secretive that when they were asked about party tenets or beliefs, they were supposed to answer, "I know nothing." The party thus became known as the Know-Nothings, an appellation that is still with us today.

Last week, Barack Obama talked about how our schools need to put more emphasis on teaching foreign languages, saying that language skills are more important than ever in an increasingly globalized economy. More language skills = better jobs = more money.

Sounds pretty reasonable, right? Well, our generation's Know-Nothings responded with the vitriol and rage fully expected of ignorant people who know they're going to get creamed in November. Many accused Obama of wanting to force children to speak Spanish. The Weekly Standard called his remarks "snobbery," a line echoed by many in the conservative media who called it just one more example of how he looks down on "real Americans."

Meanwhile, the National Review indulged in some snobbery of its own, claiming that most people are too dumb to learn foreign languages or even anything beyond the three Rs. And in a neat logical backflip, they turned it into another attack on Obama for having the audacity to believe otherwise.

For their part, Fox News brought on Joey Vento, a nativist hero for putting a "This Is America: When Ordering Please Speak English" sign in his restaurant window. Calling Obama "a sick man...a scary man," Vento ranted on how Americans should shun immigrants who do not learn English. (Of course, Obama wasn't talking about immigrants of any kind, but that has never stopped Fox News from attacking him.)

Republicans are already known as the party of deliberate ignorance for their support of creationism, abstinence-only sex education and a general disdain for anything which doesn't fit their ideology. This latest tantrum does nothing to change that.

Strangers in the Land of Egypt

In the Jewish Bible, we are told not once but several times to treat other people well "because you were strangers in the Land of Egypt." It is a central theme of the Passover Seder.

Some Jews apparently need reminding of that simple fact.

Agriprocessors, set among the cornfields of Postville, Iowa, is the nation's largest kosher slaughterhouse and has long been a source of friction between its ultra-Orthodox owners and the surrounding mostly-Protestant community. (The book Postville is a fascinating look at the dichotomy between the two cultures.) It was bad enough when the company was recently raided as part of a crackdown on illegal immigrants, but more is coming out.

According to an affidavit, abuse of undocumented workers at Agriprocessors runs rampant, including:

• Workers from Guatemala and Mexico were paid far below minimum wage.
• A supervisor who sold used cars on the side threatened to fire employees who didn't buy one.
• An employee's eyes were duct-taped shut by a supervisor who then hit him with a meat hook. The employee refused to report the incident out of fear of being fired.
• Female employees were routinely pressured for sex in exchange for promotions.
• Employees were required to pay the company for use of protective equipment.
  

And on and on. There is a Yiddish expression, shande far de goyim, roughly translated as "a disgrace to the Jews," which seems to fit Agriprocessors' owners perfectly. It's a safe bet that the owners, who are known for keeping a tight watch on company operations, knew these things were happening and did nothing to stop them.

The image of the greedy, money-obsessed Jew is a stereotype that won't die, and every time Jewish business owners get caught doing something despicable like this, it just perpetuates it.

Undocumented immigrants are among the most vulnerable members of American society. At every turn, they are demeaned, victimized and blamed for everything that goes wrong. One would think that Orthodox Jews of all people would pay special attention to the Biblical injunction against oppressing other people.

But it just goes to show that Jews are just like everyone else. Some are good people, some are bad.

And some, it seems, bring disgrace to all Jews by their actions.

Whine and Cheese

Being a father with two young children, I am well acquainted with the Nickelodeon cartoon The Fairly Oddparents, in which a boy with fairy godparents wishes for all sorts of weird things. When the wishes backfire and turn disastrous, he simply wishes them away and everything returns to normal.

The Nickelodeon writers seem to be handling John McCain's economic policy. The candidate has repeatedly claimed that America's financial problems are all "psychological" and that we can just wish them away. And on Wednesday, McCain adviser Phil Gramm told the Washington Times that all this "recession" business is in our minds.

"You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession," he said. "We have sort of become a nation of whiners. You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline."

Buck up, act like a man, and everything will be fine, he says.

Well.

Is it "whining" when we agonize about how to make the mortgage payment? Is it "complaining" when we stay awake at night having to choose between putting food on the table and getting medicine for our kids? And is it "mental" when we worry about how to afford the gas to get to work?

I think not.

Gramm's comments - and McCain's initial support until a public outcry made him back off - betray what he really feels about the rest of us. He and his ilk literally seem to have no clue what is happening beyond their limos and gated communities. Protected by their millions of dollars, they have sealed themselves off from the rest of us, secure that they never have to face the economic squeezes that the rest of us deal with every day.

As long as the fat cats are sitting pretty, the rest of the world can go to hell.

And that is Republican economic policy in a nutshell.

The More Things Change...

It's not enough that John McCain is running on a platform of continuing all of President Bush's disastrous policies - he has to imitate the Decider's worst practices as well.

On Monday, McCain was speaking in Denver at a public venue, a town-hall event described as "open to the public." Carol Kreck, a 61-year-old librarian, took that description seriously and so in the best American tradition of vigorous debate showed up with a homemade protest sign saying simply "MCCAIN=BUSH."

And got arrested for it.

Yes, she got a trespassing ticket at a public event held on public property. Something tells me that if she had held up a sign saying "I (heart) McCain" or "McCain 2008," she would have been left alone. Instead, the Secret Service and the Denver police swept in and removed this purveyor of sedition before she could pollute the minds of right-thinking Americans.

Is McCain's ego really go fragile that he has to be protected from anyone who might disagree with him? Or are his handlers afraid that he might have a flashback to his POW days in Vietnam and go on a rampage?

Or perhaps the McCain campaign wants to continue the Bush Administration's practice of keeping the president in a bubble, surrounded by sycophantic yes-men and free of any troublesome dissent or disagreement.

And we see what that has gotten us.

Informers Among Us

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush Administration set up Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) which was little more than a civilian corps of informers. Anyone whose job takes him or her into someone's home - mail carriers, plumbers, home nurses, etc - was given the job of looking for anything "suspicious" and report it. Millions of perfectly law-abiding citizens could have been turned in for having the "wrong" books on their shelves or the "wrong" pictures on the wall. After it was leaked to the media, an uproar ensued and the program was shut down.

Until now.

The Denver Post is reporting that the White House is up to its old tricks, only under a different name. "Hundreds of police, firefighters, paramedics and even utility workers," the newspaper says, "have been trained and recently dispatched as 'Terrorism Liaison Officers' in Colorado and a handful of other states to hunt for 'suspicious activity' - and are reporting their findings into secret government databases."

Of course, "suspicious activity" is defined so vaguely as to encompass practically everything. The TLO's training materials advise informers to watch out for anyone "taking photos of no apparent aesthetic value, making measurements or notes, espousing extremist beliefs or conversing in code." This would ensnare realtors, surveyors, journalists, shutterbugs, public speakers, and a whole host of other entirely innocent people.

Joseph Stalin would be proud of the national security state we are constructing. When everyone spies on everyone else, and when people are afraid to speak out, we have become the sort of repressive society Osama bin Laden would love.

An Odd Definition of Slavery

Jonah Goldberg, who once said it's a peachy idea to bring back literacy tests to let only "properly" educated Americans vote, is at it again. In his Los Angeles Times op-ed column this morning, he actually claimed that Barack Obama's proposal of national service is akin to slavery:

There's a weird irony at work when Sen. Barack Obama, the black presidential candidate who will allegedly scrub the stain of racism from the nation, vows to run afoul of the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery.

For those who don't remember, the 13th Amendment says: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime ... shall exist within the United States."

I guess in Obama's mind it must be a crime to be born or to go to college.

In his speech on national service Wednesday at the University of Colorado, Obama promised that as president he would "set a goal for all American middle and high school students to perform 50 hours of service a year, and for all college students to perform 100 hours of service a year."

He would see that these goals are met by, among other things, attaching strings to federal education dollars. If you don't make the kids report for duty, he's essentially telling schools and college kids, you'll lose money you can't afford to lose. In short, he'll make service compulsory by merely compelling schools to make it compulsory.

Is he kidding? Does he really not know (or care) that many schools already require some form of community service as a graduation requirement, or that the No Child Left Behind act similarly threatens to withhold federal funding from schools?

Or does it count as "slavery" only when a black Democrat suggests it?

For that matter, students are required to do all sorts of things like, um, show up for class and, er, take exams. Does that mean all students are slaves, or that all children who are told to clean up their rooms and take out the garbage are slaves?

And while many children (or those who are just childish) may scream "slavery!" at being told to do anything at all, grownups know better. Goldberg really should as well.

Perhaps he should have paid more attention in school.